Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “So this entry,” Quin said, “describes the Middle Dread killing a Young Dread—obviously a much earlier Young Dread than the one we know now—and pulling his body into the river.” She pointed to the series of athame symbols written in the margin by a modern ballpoint pen. “It looks like Catherine figured out where this happened, because she wrote these coordinates next to it.”

  Questions presented themselves to Shinobu immediately. “Are Dreads allowed to kill each other?” he asked. “Or do they have to have a trial or a vote or something?”

  “I don’t know, but even if they are allowed, I can’t imagine it would be done without the Old Dread present, can you?”

  “No.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume the Middle was doing something wrong,” she said. “So in the first entry, the Middle kills a Young Dread in a forest by a river, a ‘good journey’ from a stronghold. Now look at the second one.”

  He read this one over her shoulder as she read it aloud:

  1610?

  …he did declare justice against my father, Sir Robert, of the house of the horse, for transgressions against the sacred three laws of Seekers. He declared Sir Robert had killed another Seeker and likewise harmed mankind.

  He called my father to that place in the forest where he is often seen. We make it such on our stone device—

  Here a series of athame coordinates had been included by the document’s author, written in messy quill pen. They examined them for a moment and then continued reading:

  Arriving then together, my father commanded me up a tree to safety. I was to be his witness but not take part. The Myddle did appear and without argument did he strike my father dead as punishment for his crimes and removed his body past the river.

  The Myddle come back directly, kicking dirt over my father’s blood on the ground. Hid in the branches of a tree, I wept but kept silent.

  There was a noise of athame, a shaking of the air, and the eldest Dread Seeker arrived with eyes burning and whypsword drawn. Fearful argument ensued. The eldest struck with limbs like lightning, he disarm the Myddle and cast him to the earth, but the Myddle pled that his actions were just.

  I could not make my limbs move to come down to earth and say what I knew. There was no crime save my father witnesseth the Myddle in an untoward act with a woman. God forgive me in my terror I did not move.

  The Myddle left in shame. The eldest Dread remained and did turn to me and speake thus: He were in the wrong and ye have my apology. He will not be wrong again, that I promise. He will be a changed man and a decent Dread.

  Within the month my brother too was gone, though others have sworn to me he was killed by a fellow Seeker, not the Myddle Dread. I know not what to believe.

  When she’d finished reading, Quin looked over the pages for a few moments and tapped a small drawing in the margin that appeared to have been added by Catherine. “What do you think this is?” she asked.

  “A hill?” Shinobu suggested. “Or maybe a cavern?”

  “In this note,” Quin said thoughtfully, “the Middle declares ‘justice’ against a Seeker and calls him to a particular place in a forest—these coordinates, and maybe there’s a hill nearby—where the Middle kills him, as punishment for breaking a Seeker law, while the man’s son watches from a tree.”

  “The son says it wasn’t justice,” Shinobu pointed out. “And it sounds like the Old Dread agreed and wasn’t pleased.”

  “Yes. It mentions a river as well. And look at the coordinates. Isn’t that Scotland? Aren’t both entries pointing to Scotland?”

  “I think so.”

  They’d gained a working knowledge of athame coordinates during their training, but unless it was a location they were intimately familiar with, like Hong Kong or Scotland, neither could decipher, based solely on the symbols involved, where a set of coordinates would take them.

  “Now the third page,” Quin said, and she read out the final entry:

  April the Twelfth, 1870

  Father,

  The Middle Dread returned not three days past. He did not announce himself, but Gerald was hunting alone and spied him by the loch and fortress.

  Shall I make some acknowledgement of his presence? I do not wish to offend with forwardness but nor with lack of respect.

  Further, something new. There are two youths with him, of lowly families by their dress and speech. The Dread instructs them in swordplay. They do a strange arithmetic among them, counting numbers, and always they sum to two hundreds.

  What are we to make of this?

  My love to you and my brothers.

  Thomas

  Again, with a modern pen, Catherine had written athame coordinates into the margin. “Almost the same coordinates,” Quin said, “and here’s the first mention of him training those boys—if they are the same boys.”

  “In a forest, and it’s by water again, because he mentions the loch,” Shinobu added.

  “And a fortress. These three incidents must have happened quite near each other. We have the Middle Dread in all of them, and the boys in this last. And Catherine took the trouble to track down the locations of where they took place.”

  The descriptions of forest, loch, and fortress tugged at Shinobu’s thoughts. He experienced a wash of déjà vu, as though he were remembering a half-forgotten conversation or an especially vivid dream. He wanted to see these places—no, he needed to see them.

  He tried to keep his voice steady as he asked her, “We’re going to these coordinates? That’s what you’re thinking?”

  Quin looked up at him. “I can’t imagine we’ll find anything—the journal entries are so old. But…it couldn’t hurt to go and look at where these incidents happened, could it?”

  “Why not?” he agreed.

  It was a tremendous relief that Quin’s thoughts were running parallel to his own. Maybe he never had to tell her that some of those thoughts had come to him from the focal. He had spoiled something by lying to her, but he couldn’t undo the lie just yet, because he still wanted to use the focal.

  But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t use it again. And eventually he would tell her.

  “Prepare yourself,” the Young Dread said.

  Behind her loomed the decaying hulk of an enormous shipwreck, black against the clear blue sky. Other wrecks were visible in the distance, the remainders of their hulls like jagged rib cages among sand dunes along the coastline. Hordes of seals were barking and basking in the sun close to the water, and beyond the shore, the sand became desert, stretching in every direction.

  They had used the coordinates in his mother’s journal under the house of the bear—the last location where its athame had been seen—and they were standing on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.

  The sand was cool beneath his feet, but the sun was already hot and bright. Behind him was the ocean, pounding against the shore and casting spray high into the air. Before him were steep dunes leading up to a desert with nothing but dry scrub bushes across its face. This wasteland reached from the beach to distant hills in the east and continued on to the south, perhaps forever.

  John brought the binoculars to his eyes, focused them again on a sandstone peak beyond the desert. The dark entrance to a cave was just visible, a smudge on the red slope. But even from so far away he recognized the cave, and the line of hills behind it. They matched Catherine’s drawing perfectly. He suspected Maud had altered the coordinates slightly, bringing him to a point far from the cave, in order to make him run.

  John put the binoculars away. “I’m ready,” he told the Young Dread. She had allowed him to come here, but she’d insisted the expedition would be a training session.

  “Begin!” she called.

  He ran.

  Despite the sun, he wore his cloak, just as Maud did. She made him go unclothed when training in the cold, and now she was keeping him covered in the desert heat. Because she loves discomfort, he thought. My grandmother Maggie was like that in her own way. Never leaving me in peace. Keepi
ng me afraid. Have I ever relaxed? The answer came against his will: Yes, a few times, with Quin. But most of his life had been lived under extreme tension.

  He charged up the dunes, and was sweating and out of breath by the time he reached the first peak.

  “Faster!” Maud called. She had kept up with him easily, despite carrying all of their weapons on her back, including the metal helmet and the circular shield they’d found on Traveler. He’d not yet been allowed to use either.

  From the crest of the dunes, the sand petered out and became the hard, crumbling earth of the desert. John picked up his pace. I’m thirsty already. How will I make it to the cave? And with that, his thoughts ran further away: That night under the floor in my mother’s apartment, I was thirsty like this. I was under there so long…

  “Keep your mind here—on the run,” Maud admonished, as though reading his straying thoughts. “Only the run.”

  He did as she said, pointing his head forward, his eyes, with the focus of the steady stare, always on the same spot fifteen feet ahead, watching dusty earth with occasional patches of dry grass or clawlike bushes. One step forward, then the next, over and over. His body was a machine.

  Nothing else matters at this moment, just the run, he told himself. For Catherine, nothing mattered but bringing back our house. It was more important to her than love or death…

  His mind continued this way, as it always did, bringing him images of his mother, his grandmother, Quin…He shook his head to rid himself of unwanted thoughts. Run! he commanded.

  After two miles, the cave still didn’t appear any closer. He was sweating harder, his clothing sticking to him.

  “Come, John!” the Young Dread called. Though she was running slightly ahead and hadn’t looked back, somehow she sensed that he’d slowed.

  His body hurt. Like a reflex, he was thinking of Quin again. The way he’d pulled her behind the training barn that first time they’d kissed. Her eyes had been bright, her cheeks rosy from the cold. She’d loved him then. The idea that she hated him now gave him a physical ache.

  It’s nothing, he told himself. Pain is nothing—in your heart or in your legs. Thirst is nothing. Heat is nothing. Catherine would call them small things. And Maggie showed—

  He stopped his thoughts. He didn’t need Catherine or Maggie in his head just now. He needed only to run.

  And he did.

  An hour had passed before the hill was noticeably closer. By then John was moving across a land of hard-packed dirt and grass, weaving his way through the tiny skeletal bushes that were more numerous here. His feet pounded beneath him like pistons in an engine, tireless now even though he was drenched in sweat. I might run forever, he thought. I love this.

  And then he fell. Before he’d realized it, his head hit the hard earth, dirt firm against his cheekbone.

  Run! he told himself. But his body would not. He had used it up.

  The Young Dread was there, kneeling next to him. She pulled him to a sitting position, held him against her, and poured water into his mouth from her canteen. John’s instinct was to gulp, but he restrained himself and drank slowly for a long time.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him quietly. Her light brown eyes were bright in the sun as she looked down into his face, and her smooth, even voice was comforting.

  “I’m thinking…I want to run.”

  “Good,” she said. “Your mind is empty.”

  John handed back the canteen and understood that she was right. His mother’s death, his grandmother’s warnings, and even Quin were distant. His head, for once, was quiet.

  “What do you wish to learn here, in this desert?” Maud asked him. She was holding the metal helmet, the focal, above his head.

  “What my mother found in this place,” he answered at once. “And how it will lead me to the house of the bear.”

  “Keep those thoughts in your mind.”

  With that, she slipped the helmet onto his head and helped him to his feet. John nearly fell as the electric buzz of the focal passed through him. The landscape wheeled. He threw his arms out for balance. Then he steadied.

  There was the cave, close enough now to discern details. Waves of heat rose off the desert all around him, and the scrub, for miles in every direction, was moving in a slow breeze. He could feel the pressure of the hot air as it rose up into the vast blue arch of the sky. He was connected to all these things, was part of them, and his thoughts were his own to command.

  “Now run!” Maud ordered.

  He did.

  —

  The sun was beginning to set when they scaled the red earth of the hill and arrived at the cave. The Young Dread reached it before John, and after he’d stooped down to enter beneath an overhang of rock, he found her standing inside the dark space, her cloak blending into the shadows. She looked as though she had not just run ten or fifteen miles, but rather had been waiting in the cool of the cave all day for him to arrive.

  She pulled the focal from his head the moment he appeared. When the helmet slid away, there was discord in his ears, a sensation of pushing and pulling, as though it had been holding him tightly and was now struggling to let go. John lost his balance, felt sand and rock beneath his hands, then found himself lying on the rough stone floor of the cave. He lay there, catching his breath, feeling his bullet wound pulsing hotly with the beat of his heart. He stared up at the ceiling as the crackle and tug of the helmet faded. He was, all at once, completely exhausted.

  The cave was already in twilight, but there was enough light for him to see the dimensions of the space. It reached inward about twenty yards from the mouth to a back wall, where the red rock blended into shadows. And though the entrance was low, the cave’s ceiling was quite high, disappearing above him into hazy dimness.

  The Young Dread’s cloak fluttered next to his ear as she seated herself nearby. The light was fading quickly, but he could make out her pale face and long hair as she threw her hood back to look down at him. When she handed him the canteen, he lifted himself up onto an elbow to drink.

  “Have you discovered anything, during your run?” she asked.

  In fact he had. Several things had become clear to him while in the focal. He drank for a while and used the time to put his thoughts in order.

  “My mother was interested in all the Seeker houses,” he said meditatively. “When I first looked at her journal, I thought it was partly about the Dreads but mostly about revenge, yet she wasn’t only following the houses who’d done us harm.”

  “No,” Maud agreed. “Her interests were wider than that.”

  “Maybe she started keeping the journal before she knew what those houses had done to us,” he mused. The Catherine who had written in the journal seemed mostly curious, not angry. “Which is why I needed to look at Maggie’s pictures. To focus my search.”

  The Young Dread said nothing.

  John drank again until he felt the life-giving trail of water down his throat, through his stomach, and branching from there to every cell of his body.

  “Why did you make me run so long before using the focal?”

  There was a pause, and then Maud explained, in her even tone, “It has a second name—havoc helm. A focal bears traces of the people who have used it before, especially if it has been used by one person many times. Thoughts…patterns…habits…may”—she chose her words carefully—“remain inside the helmet, like a fog. If you do not fully clear your mind, you will be prey to those foreign thoughts. It can even split one’s mind into two parts—one of which begins to look a lot like someone else.” She helped him sit up. “A hard run is a good way to empty your mind before using the focal. Now you should feel only your own thoughts, in focus.”

  John nodded. He was physically spent, but a new mental energy flowed through him. He understood that the focal hadn’t taught him anything new; rather it had let him see his own knowledge through a new lens. Catherine had tracked Seekers from the house of the bear here, to this cave. And from her
e he must discover where to go next.

  The Young Dread was using her flint. Bright sparks flew off the stone in the darkness, illuminating her face in bursts of white light. After a few minutes, she’d lit the leaves on a large branch from one of the scrubby desert bushes outside the cave.

  She held the torch out for John, and he pulled himself to his feet to take it. The red sandstone of the cave danced around him in the unsteady light. John thought the smoke would quickly fill the space, but as the wood burned, the high ceiling funneled the smoke upward and away. Carved into the striated sandstone of the cave’s roof, the lines hewn so deeply they were awash with dancing shadows, was the shape of a bear.

  The walls were uneven but bare of any other ornamentation or sign of human presence, until he got to the back of the cave. Here the rock roof sloped down dramatically to meet the floor at a steep, inward angle. Where the wall touched the floor, the two planes made a wedge of space, nearly impenetrable by the light of the torch, as though the ground were being eaten by shadows at the back edge. Above those shadows was a patch of writing.

  “Maud.”

  The Young Dread moved silently across the rough floor into the pool of light. Small figures had been carved on the back wall. No, not carved, John saw, melted. The edges of the figures were smooth and rounded, and streams of molten sandstone had dripped from the wall to pool on the floor, where they’d hardened into glassy puddles. The inscription read:

  91

  30

  57

  22

  PSDS

  “What is PSDS?” John asked.

  The Young Dread shook her head, telling him she didn’t know and also brushing his question aside. “There’s something there,” she said quietly.

  She pointed to the low, dark place where the sloping wall met the ground. Her eyes were much better than his at seeing in the dark, and John could discern nothing in the shadows at first. But when he knelt down and held the flame closer, the light revealed two human figures, wedged as far as they could be wedged against the back wall.